Sunset Short Version
by theCalliope
Summary: Gave up on Sunset? Just didn't want to read something that long? This is the ship wars fic that the story is based on. All of the Sunset, 8% of the length.


_**A/N: I promised some people who gave up on the long version of **_**Sunset_ that I would post the ship wars fic it was based on. Here you go :) I haven't edited this since I wrote it and a lot of details have changed, so don't expect exactly the same story :)_**

One day Spock, who was still young, woke up next to an old woman. It wasn't that he hadn't seen her age before—he had watched as the lines appeared on her face, her skin became thin papery and she gained weight over the years and then lost it again. But for the first time, he looked down at her and she seemed frail. Her grey hair was spread across the pillow and her bony body seemed impossibly fragile under the blankets. She was seventy-five. Spock tried not to dwell on the thought as he got up and went on with his day.

It was three months later when his father noticed, at Thanksgiving. It was a small dinner, just Spock, his father, Nyota and their daughter Nadine, who had just gotten divorced. Sarek gave Spock a piercing look as he helped Nyota into her chair. He cornered him after they were done eating.

"I think that it is time you consider looking for a new mate," he told Spock in the darkness of the TV room. Spock said nothing and turned away from his father, as if he thought the request was beyond consideration. Sarek moved towards him and looked into his son's opposing eyes,

"You should at the very least think about it."

Spock tried to conceal his irritation. Of course he had thought about it. Twice, he and Nyota had seen _Cat on a Hot Tin Roof_, and the first time, when the patriarch had said that he'd kept on sleeping with his wife long after he should have stopped they'd laughed, but the second time they'd sat there silently, awkwardly with his smooth hand clasped around her bony one.

Later that night, he'd gone out to get ice cream for Nadine, who was doing so well, studying for her GED so she could get into community college, and he walked past the working girls and thought about it. He'd never done anything. But he'd thought about it.

"Father," he said, looking down, "I cannot."

"Spock," Sarek whispered harshly, "You need to think about this. What if you hurt her? What if she cannot sate you? What if both happen?"

Spock didn't answer. Sarek persisted.

"What about Nadine? What if she needs you?"

Spock raised his eyebrow. Sarek had never approved of adoption, or of Nadine. He was pandering.

"Why are you going to such great lengths to raise somebody else's bastard child?" he had asked Spock more than once.

"Somebody has to," Spock would usually answer, with a touch of anger.

But Nadine wasn't really the consideration here, anyhow. Spock broke his father's gaze and shook his head.

"We have time. Just think about it," Sarek said finally, seeing that his son was not budging.

It was three weeks later, when Nyota was confined to a wheelchair after falling and breaking her hip in the bath that Spock realized that his father was right. He told him to go ahead and make the arrangements.

That night, as Spock wheeled Nyota into the bathroom, he looked down at her and ran one hand through her coarse hair sadly. They had been through so much together.

It had started as a story book book romance and gone on to a fairy tale wedding. They'd ridden off into the sunset and lived happily ever after. But the sunset was very far away and happily ever after was a very, very long time.

After the first year, Spock was still infatuated. For their first anniversary, Spock had bought her jewellery and taken her dancing and made a nice dinner. Afterwards, they'd engaged in gratuitous physical contact. But as the weeks went on, cracks began to form.

Spock started to realize all sorts of things about Nyota that he'd never noticed before. She was vain. She used vulgar swear words. She didn't take very good care of her possessions. On their own, they were small things, but there was something about dealing with them for the rest of her life that made them seem imposing.

They began to fight often, first about trivial things and later on about Nadine. But somehow, they always worked it out. There was something about Nyota's big, dark eyes that made Spock think that he would always forgive her, no matter how much she annoyed him.

On their fifth anniversary, feeling much less idealistic, Spock made Nyota a slideshow of pictures of them together as a tribute to how much they had accomplished. It was then, after she had finished being endeared that they realized that almost all of the pictures had been taken on starships.

After they finished their tour of duty on the Enterprise, they didn't reapply. Instead, they went back to Earth and bought a big house with a yard. They got safe, steady jobs at Starfleet headquarters, and then they waited. And waited. And waited.

Eventually, they enlisted doctors and geneticists and cold metal instruments, but she never got past the third month. They saw every expert they could think of. No one could tell them why.

Two weeks and five days after their tenth anniversary, Spock found Nyota on the toilet crying and knew what was happening. He tried to comfort and reassure her, but there was something about the look of steel in her eye that made him know that this was the last time. They weren't going to try again.

Slowly, they moved on. They filled the nursery with exercise equipment and started taking more dangerous assignments. Spock started working on Pike's private transport. He had become one of the Federation's most powerful politicians and needed constant protection. Piloting and organizing security details wasn't the most interesting work, but it was only for the meantime until Spock and Nyota could be assigned to a starship again.

One morning, on a routine return trip from a conference, Pike became seriously ill. At first the crew had thought it might be his heart condition, but it soon became evident that he had been poisoned. Spock kept waiting for one of the miracles that usually saved the day to come through, but it never did. Pike was dead within two hours.

Near the end, Pike realized what was happening and became frantic.

"My daughter," he whispered in terror, clutching onto Spock's hand.

"Padma is seventeen and bright, she can take care of herself," Spock tried to reassure him.

Pike looked confused.

"Not Padma," he wailed, "Nadine."

Spock looked at Pike blankly.

"Her mother ," he groaned "Was was such a beauty when I met her and when she died, I meant to go and get her ... I thought that maybe my wife would forgive me and we could raise her. But I couldn't."

Spock wasn't sure what to think of this new revelation, but kept his hand clasped in Pike's.

"I just couldn't own up," Pike cried out, "To what I'd done."

Spock put his arm around Pike's shoulder to try to comfort him. He was sweating profusely and his breathing was laboured.

"Where is she now?" Spock asked after a minute.

"She was in foster care," Pike whispered, "But I lost track of her ..."

With this thought, and perhaps the fear of imminent death, Pike began to bawl. Spock considered Pike to be one of his closest friends. It was difficult to watch.

"I will find her," Spock promised, laying Pike down on his back so he could breathe more easily.

"I don't believe you," Pike accused, blubbering.

"Do you think that Nyota and I left the Enterprise and moved to the suburbs to see what it was like?" Spock snapped, "We cannot have any of our own. We will find her and take her in."

This seemed to reassure Pike, and he was much less agitated when he gave in and closed his eyes. Looking down at his body, Spock felt sad and sorry. But he also felt a bit disgusted.

After the funeral, Spock and Nyota went looking for Pike's daughter. With the horror of Pike's death, Spock had never thought to ask for her surname. So they searched the globe for blond-haired, blue-eyed four-year-olds named Nadine. It took eight months, but they found her. Having been returned by several foster parents, she lived in an orphanage.

They brought her home, telling her that they were her new parents and they would always be there for her.

But she didn't believe them.

She tested them.

Four times that first week, one of them had to come home from work because the babysitter couldn't handle her. She would scream and bite and tear the house apart. Nyota was horrified, but Spock was less so. Nadine had been abandoned and rejected since birth. He knew what that was like.

One Saturday morning, after Nyota had been called urgently to Starfleet headquarters, Spock stepped outside to talk to a neighbour. When he came back in, he walked into the kitchen to find every single dish broken on the floor, and Nadine hunched over crying in the corner with blood smeared down the sides of her dress. He leapt over the dishes and ran to her as quickly as he could. He picked her up and was relieved to see that there were just superficial cuts on her hands from touching glass. He held her in his arms until she stopped crying and then bandaged her hands. Then he had her hold the bag as he cleaned the dishes up.

It was somewhere between washing the blood off her arms and explaining to her that she was not to touch any more glass, no matter how bad she felt about having broken it when Spock made a sudden realization. It wasn't about Pike anymore. He wasn't just granting a friend's last request. She really felt like his daughter.

He went upstairs to change her clothes. The dress she was wearing was too big because it had been given to them by a neighbour who had heard about Spock and Nyota's situation with Pike's kid. Going through the box of neighbours' donations and finding nothing decent, Spock picked it up and shoved it into the disposal unit.

"We need to get you some clothes," he told Nadine as he picked her up and strapped her into her car seat. They went to the department store, and he sat her in the front of a shopping cart as he filled it. Five dresses and two jumpers. Socks. Underwear. A raincoat. Party shoes and running shoes. He even let her pick out a doll, against his better judgement.

When Nyota got home, she looked irritated to see all the new things in Nadine's closet, but didn't say anything.

"Where are the dishes?" she asked Spock instead.

"There was an accident," he replied evasively, but it was all he needed to say, really. Nyota didn't think that it was Spock who had managed to somehow destroy every dish in the house.

They ate dinner off of napkins.

"You shouldn't have bought so much stuff when we're not sure we're going to keep her," Nyota explained her anger later.

"We are going to keep her," Spock responded, giving Nyota a look that he had never given her before. For the first time, he didn't give a damn what she thought. She seemed to sense this, because she backed down.

"I guess we were leaning that way anyhow," she said mildly.

A few weeks later, they signed the papers and Spock insisted that they throw Nadine a party.

But Nyota never quite warmed up to Nadine the way Spock had. They were always a bit distant.

"She doesn't love me, she wishes she could have had her own kid!" Nadine had yelled out more than once during fights. When she had been sent home from school after kicking a boy in gym class. After she had been caught smoking pot between classes. When she had been kicked out of her second high school.

But the truth was that Nyota had never really gotten over her lost babies. It always affected her. And Nadine, a child, could never understand this.

Looking down at Nyota in her wheelchair, Spock wondered if she, like Pike, had regrets. He wheeled her to the sink so she could brush her teeth and lifted her into bed.

Two weeks later, while Nyota was visiting her nephew, Spock made a trip to New Vulcan. He kneeled at the base of an altar and created a bond with a woman his father had selected. She was dressed in fine clothing and wore beautiful jewellery, but Spock couldn't enjoy her appearance. His stomach was wrenched with guilt. He still couldn't believe he was doing this.

He went back to Earth and tried to forget about it for two years until he was frothing at the mouth, sweating and his limbs were jerking wildly.

He found her in the caves on New Vulcan and moved to take her, and found that it was different. Nyota had always been terrified, and he had held back, even beneath his madness. But Tannis, his new mate was aroused and exuberant. She was as strong as he was, and fought him off in play for a bit before shrieking gleefully as he ripped her clothes off and bit her. The mood was contagious, and by the end, all they could do was lie on the ground and go at it over and over and over.

Eventually, it wore off and Spock and Tannis leaned exhaustedly against the side of the cave.

"I guess it is back to Earth for you," she said sadly. And there was something about her expression, something about the way she looked at him that made Spock want to promise to love her forever. But instead, he whispered,

"You are aware of my situation."

She looked at him darkly and he gave her one last embrace before they got up and sorted through their torn clothing. Then he got on the transport back to Earth.

When he saw Nyota, he immediately felt guilty. She never asked him how he spent his vacation, and she never made any accusations, but he wondered if she knew. Logically, he knew this was unlikely, she was getting worse with numbers and probably hadn't realized that it was that time, but whenever he looked at her, he felt a terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach, as he she was looking right through him and seeing that he had betrayed her.

He poured himself into caring for her, and eventually he started feeling less bad about it. At least he was taking care of her. And it had been necessary. A matter of life and death. Or maybe that was just an excuse.

It was a few weeks later that Spock learned from his father that he and Tannis were charmed in a way that he and Nyota weren't. She was pregnant.

And of course she carried the pregnancy to term, and of course the baby was born healthy. Spock stayed on Earth the whole time, tending dedicatedly to Nyota, whose hip had healed, but was still having trouble walking. But Spock felt a strange beauty when Tannis held up a perfect baby, with a face just like his to the Comm. screen.

Spock took to talking to them every night before he went to bed. He kept it a secret. He told Nyota it was secret Starfleet business, and she believed him. She never had any reason to doubt him and as time went on, it got easier. She started getting confused. She started becoming forgetful.

In the morning, she would be as sharp as a tack, but by the evening she would be asking him where Nadine was, or whether he could give a certain message to Captain Kirk. By the next day, she had always forgotten the evening before.

One night, while Spock was talking to Tannis, Nyota wandered out the door and Spock had to call the police to find her. He took her to the doctor, and he reluctantly told Spock that it was probably time that she be placed permanently in a VA hospital.

That night, Spock hoisted Nyota into bed, and then lay down next to her. He shifted her on top of him, like they had slept together so many times when they were first married. She was still so light, and she still had the same eyes and there was still the same slope in her shoulders that he had run his hands across so many times. As he stroked her hair and pressed his cheek to hers, soft tears began to flow.

"Don't cry," Nyota squawked, "Or you won't get any ice cream."

And then the tears ran freely.

In the morning, Spock packed Nyota's things and walked her into the hospital. It wasn't cold or institutional as he had worried, but it was still impersonal and clearly designed for people who weren't in full control of their faculties. After making sure that she was comfortable in her new room, it was time for Spock to leave. He couldn't though, and just stood and stared at her through the door.

"The first few weeks are always the worst," a nurse said to him, and then he slowly walked away, his heart wrenching.

Spock threw himself into his work, but the house was still so empty without her, and the hospital only had visiting hours on weekends. Spock found himself spending hours talking to Tannis, and to his son, Sunak, who was one now and could say a few words.

On the weekends, Spock would go to the hospital with Nadine, but it wasn't the same as when she was at home. She was becoming more forgetful. She often had trouble remembering what her week had been like. They would talk a bit, but after that, Spock would usually read to her to fill the time.

"So, when are you coming to visit me?" Tannis asked playfully one night, bouncing Sunak in her lap. Normally, Spock would raise an eyebrow at such a request, as if she was teasing, but for some reason, this time, he thought about it.

He asked for a week's leave the next time he was near New Vulcan, and no one asked any questions. He knocked on Tannis's door, and she could hardly hold back a smile when she saw him.

"You came!" she said with the same look of glee she had worn in the caves. A little boy tottered up to her, and Spock looked at him and picked him up. And then he held his son for the first time.

Spock and Tannis sat and talked like they did over the Comm., but somehow it was better in person. He got to see more of her life. Spock had always pictured her as being exactly like Nyota, but in reality she was very different. She was a perfectionist and rather judgemental of people that didn't live up to her standards. Spock found this both annoying and amusing.

Spock had sometimes worried about her being alone with a baby, but he came to realize that she was the sort of woman who could do her work, care for her baby and keep the house looking immaculate with time left over to raise money for disaster relief. His son behaved perfectly. And she was so civil. Instead of being angry at Spock for leaving, she fawned over him.

Spock began to understand Pike. He had never before understood how truly seductive a woman could be. He had gone to New Vulcan planning not to sleep with Tannis, and he had gone through the day planning not to, but then she put her arms around him and whispered about how much she had missed him, and then he was lost. And afterwards, he thought about Nyota and felt bad, and vowed never to do it again, and the next night it happened all over again.

After the week was over, Spock went back to Earth and returned to his life. But he missed Tannis. He wasn't sure if he had feelings for her or was just lonely, but he missed her.

But there was also Nyota. She could do less and less each time he saw her, and eventually, he was the only person she could recognize. But when she opened up her eyes when she was him and gave him a toothless grin, she seemed so happy that Spock thought he could never leave her.

But then he would go home, and it would be the empty house and Tannis on the Comm. again. Six months later, Spock once again went to see her.

Sunak was getting older. He was going to Vulcan preschool. He could talk. One night, Spock and Tannis went to a recital, and Spock got to see his kid get up and say a poem instead of trying to dig her out from under the bleachers.

But he also couldn't help but think about how Nadine, no matter what she was doing, no matter what time it was would shake the house running to jump into his arms the moment he walked into the door, and how Sunak always just stood there.

When it was time to leave, Spock put his hand against Tannis's belly. They hadn't discussed what was obvious. She was pregnant again.

"I will be back," Spock said, not giving a time frame. To his surprise, Sunak piped up.

"I don't believe you!" he accused, and picked up a jar of potpourri and threw it. For a Vulcan child, this was a terrible tantrum.

"I am so sorry, I do not know what has gotten into him!" Tannis apologized, as if it was purely her responsibility.

Spock knew how to handle tantrums. He picked the boy up and held him until he was calm. But he wouldn't be there to reassure him when he woke up in the middle of the night. And he wouldn't be there in the morning.

Spock's heart was heavy as he rode the transport back, but he knew what he had to do. He called Nadine, and they emptied his house. Nadine kept some of Nyota's stuff, but mostly, they disposed of it. She promised to let Spock know when the house had been sold.

They went to the hospital one last time, and as they waited for the nurse to wheel Nyota out, Nadine asked,

"There's another woman, isn't there."

Instead of answering, Spock brought out that human invention, his wallet, and took out a picture of Sunak and handed it to her.

"He's sweet, isn't he?" she asked offhandedly, but Spock knew that even now, there was no such thing as an innocent question.

"He is a bit boring and not very affectionate," Spock stated, and Nadine gave him a smile, reassured. She put her arm around him, as if to tell him that it was okay, she knew he made mistakes and she forgave him.

They stood up as the nurse wheeled Nyota in. She looked so much like a bird now, dreadfully thin, her hands coiled like claws.

"Spock!" she cawed with a toothless smile and he went up and held her hand. He wheeled her to the window, and they watched the people passing by.

"That young man looks like Captain Kirk," Nyota said about one courier. Spock and Nadine laughed. He looked nothing like Captain Kirk.

Spock went to get Nyota some tea, and she turned to Nadine.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"Nadine," she replied, "Your daughter."

"You don't look like my daughter," Nyota squawked suspiciously.

"I'm adopted," Nadine replied darkly, as if it summed up her entire life.

"Is Spock coming today?" Nyota inquired, and Nadine didn't answer.

Spock came out with the tea, and Nyota said his name again, as if she had just seen him. She seemed so pleased. He ran his arm across her shoulder sadly.

As they sat and looked out at the street, Spock thought about Pike and Nadine and Nyota. And he wondered why it was so hard, doing what was he though was right.

_**A/N: If you liked this, check out the long version of **_**Sunset_, see my profile._**


End file.
